As a lot of my Smith/Attwell family lived in/around Old Windsor, I have spent a lot of time looking through old documents etc for that area. I happened upon a list of burials in the Old WIndsor Churchyard which contained a couple of my ancestors, the list was numbered & indexed and mentioned a map of the gravestones, but no-one seemed to know where this map was any more. After a bit of digging, I found it in the Berkshire Records Office, apparently one of the vicars at the Church had deposited it there, along with a copy of the list, so I managed to find the gravestones I was looking for.

I decided that, as a little project, I would make this available to the public, so I sought permissions from the BRO to copy the list & map and they agreed. I had to hand trace the map as it was too large to photocopy, but they agreed to photocopy the list for me. I then spotted a few names, mentioned at the begining of the list, of the original authors, so I made some enquiries and found that one of the authors was still alive & still living in Old Windsor. She happened to be a member of the Windsor branch of the Berkshire Family History Society (as was I) so I asked around & met up with her on one of their meetings. She was very pleased that the map had been found as she believed it was lost too. I asked her permission to transcribe the book and she was happy for me to do it but said that I’d need to get permission from the Church in Old Windsor as she’d handed over the rights to them. A quick email to the vicar and he also agreed that it could be published online (with a few conditions).

I started by scanning in the map (in sections which were then stitched together) and then used a vector drawing package to re-trace it into a scaleable image, added some colour etc to make it look nicer and made a PDF out of it. Then I scanned in all of the pages of the list & OCR’d them to save on some typing, then went through them twice, correcting & checking every word/date etc. to ensure that it was all correct, I tried to stick to the exact formatting (as far as possible) of the document so that dates/notes lined up with the text.

Having completed the task, I was offered the chance of having it hosted on Genuki’s Old Windsor page, so I agreed to that, so that people could find it (hopefully) easily if they were researching that area.